burton exhausts the subject in a single paragraph. ben jonson, though a jolly good fellow, was opposed to the habit of smoking. but spenser mentions divine tobacco. waltons piscator indulges in a pipe at breakfast, and venator has his tobacco brought from london to insure its purity. sweet izaak could have selected no more soothing minister than the pipe to the contemplative mans recreation. as the new sedative gains in esteem, we find francis quarles, in his emblems, treating it in this serio-comic vein: flint-hearted stoics, you whose marble eyes contemn a wrinkle, and whose souls despise to follow natures too affected fashion, or travel in the regent walk of passion, whose rigid hearts disdain to shrink at fears, or play at fast-and-loose with smiles and tears, come, burst your spleens with laughter to behold a new-found vanity, which days of old neer knew,a vanity that has beset the world, and made more slaves than mahomet, that has condemned us to the servile yoke of slavery, and made us slaves to smoke, but stay! why tax i thus our modern times for new-born follies and for new-born crimes? are we sole guilty, and the first age free? no: they were smoked and slaved as well as we. whats sweet-lipped honors blast, but smoke? whats treasure, but very smoke? and whats more smoke than pleasure? brand gives us the whole matter in a nutshell, in the following quaint epigram, entitled a tobacconist, taken from an old collection: all dainty meats i do defy which feed men fat as swine; he is a frugal man, indeed, that on a leaf can dine. he needs no napkin for his hands his fingers ends to wipe, that keeps his kitchen in a box, and roast meat in a pipe. and so on, the singers of succeeding years, _usque ad nauseam_,a loathing equalled only by that of the earlier writers for the plant, now so lauded. tobacco-worship seems to us to culminate in the following stanza from a german song: tabak ist mein leben, dem hab ich mich ergeben, ergeben; tabak ist meine lust. und eh ich ihn sollt lassen, viel lieber wollt ich hassen, ja, hassen selbst eines mädchens kuss. as it is with your sex, my dear madam, that this question of tobacco is to be mainly argued,for, to your honor be it spoken, you have always been of the reformatory party,let us hope, that, provided you have not read or translated the last verse, you have recovered your natural amiability, ruffled perhaps by this odious subject, and are prepared to believe us when we tell you that these opposite opinions cannot be wholly reconciled, and to follow us patiently while we attempt to show that a certain gentleman, introduced to your maternal ancestor at a very remote period of the worlds history, is not so black as he is sometimes painted. let us keep good-natured, at least, in this discussion; for we propose to settle it without taking off the gloves, as we intimated in the opening paragraph. your patience will be much needed for the sad army of facts and figures which is to follow. therefore it is but just that you should speak now, after these long sentences. your george will never smoke? excuse me. _when_ he will smoke depends upon the precocity of his individual generation; and that increases in a direct ratio with time itself, in this country. thus, to state the matter in an approximate inverse arithmetical progression, and dating the birth of young america about the year 1825,previously to which reigned the dark ages of oldfogydom, so called,we find as follows: from 1825 to 1835, young gentlemen learned to smoke when from 25 to 20 years of age; from 1835 to 1845, young _gents_, ditto, ditto, from 20 to 15 years; 1845 to 1855, from 15 to 10; 1855 to 1865, 10 to 5; 1865 to 1875, 5 to 0; and, if we continue, 1875 to 1885, zero to minus: but really the question is becoming too nebulous. _corollary_. in about ten years, the youth of the united states will smoke contemporaneously with the infant burmese, who, we are credibly informed, begin the habit _aet_. 3, or as soon as they have cut enough teeth to hold a cigar. therefore, we will say, madam, at some indefinite period of his childhood or youth,for we would not be so impolite as to infer your age by asking that of your son,the _susdit_ george will come home late from play some afternoon, languid, pale, and disinclined for tea. he will indignantly repel the accusation of feeling ill, and there will lurk about his person an indescribable odor of stale cinnamon, which you will be at a loss to account for, but which his elder brother will recognize as the natural result of smoking cinnamon cigars, wherewith certain wicked tobacconists of this city tempt curious youth. if you follow him to his chamber, you will probably discover more damning evidence of his guilt. we will draw the curtain over the scene of the spartan motherwe hope you belong to that nearly extinct classwhich is to follow. let us suppose all differences settled, the habit ostensibly given up, and your darling, grown more honest or more artful,the result is the same to your blissful ignorance,studiously pursuing his way until he enters college. some fine day you drive over to the neighboring university, and, entering his room unannounced, you find him coloring his first (factitious) meerschaum!also a sad deficiency in his wardrobe of half-worn clothes. _cest une pipe qui coûte cher à culotter_, the college meerschaum,and in more ways than one, according to the autocrat:i do not advise you, young man, to consecrate the flower of your life to painting the bowl of a pipe, _et seq_. more bold, the sophomore will smoke openly at home; and by the end of the third vacation, it is one of those unyielding _faits accomplis_ against which reformers, household or peripatetic, beat their heads in vain. perhaps your husband smokes? if so, at what period of the twenty-four hours have you invariably found mr. most lenient to your little pecuniary peccadilloes? is he not always most good-natured when his cigar is about one-third consumed, the ash evenly burnt and adherent, and not fallen into his shirt-bosom? depend upon it, tobacco is a great soother of domestic differences. let us, then, look an existing, firmly rooted evilif you will call it soin the face, and see if it is quite so bad as it is represented. it is too wide-spread to be sneered away,for we might almost say that smokers were the rule, and non-smokers the exception, among all civilized men, charles kingsley supports us here:man a cooking animal, my dear doctor johnson? pooh! man is a _smoking_ animal. there is his _ergon_, his differential energy, as the aristotelians say,his true distinction from the orangoutang. ponder it well. _query_.what did the old roman do without a cigar? how idle through the day? how survive his interminable _post-coenal_ potations?the thought is not our own. it occurs somewhere in de quincey, we believe. it is one of those self-evident propositions you wonder had not occurred to you before.what an accessory of luxury the pipe would have been to him who passed the livelong day under the mosaic arches of the _thermoe_! the _strigiles_ would have vanished before the meerschaum, had that magic clay then been known. how completely would the _hookah_ and the _narghileh_ have harmonized with the _crater, cyathi_, and tripods of the _triclinium_ in that portraiture of the decadence of rome which hangs in the luxembourg gallery! poor fellows! they managed to exist without them. though pipes are found carved on very old sculptures in china, and the habit of smoking was long since extensively followed there, according to pallas, and although certain species of the tobacco-plant, as the _nicotiana rustica_, would appear to be indigenous to the country, yet we have the best reason to conclude that america, if not the exclusive home of the herb, was the birthplace of its use by man. the first great explorer of the west found the sensuous natives of hispaniola rolling up and smoking tobacco-leaves with the same persistent indolence that we recognize in the cuban of the present day. rough cortés saw with surprise the luxurious aztec composing himself for the _siesta_ in the middle of the day as invariably as his fellow dons in castile. but he was amazed that the barbarians had discovered in tobacco a sedative to promote their reveries and compose them to sleep, of which the _hidalgos_ were as yet ignorant, but which they were soon to appropriate with avidity, and to use with equal zest. humboldt says that it had been cultivated by the people of orinoco from time immemorial, and was smoked all over america at the time of the spanish conquest,also that it was first discovered by europeans in yucatan, in 1520, and was there called _petum_. tobacco, according to the same authority, was taken from the word _tabac_, the name of an instrument used in the preparation of the herb. though columbus and his immediate followers doubtless brought home specimens of tobacco among the other spoils of the new world, jean nicot, ambassador to portugal from francis ii., first sent the seeds to france, where they were cultivated and used about the year 1560. in honor of its sponsor, botany has named the plant _nicotiana tabacum_, and chemistry distinguished as _nicotin_ its active alkaloid